IN
the spring of 1947, Mohammad Ali Jinnah had been told that he had only
a few more months of life left. Would he, in those months, be able to
realise his life’s dream: Pakistan.

Lord Mountbatten, for
his part, had no idea that Jinnah was a dying man. He is on record as
saying that if he had known what doctors had told Jinnah, then he
might not have given in so easily to Jinnah’s Partition plan. In the
event, Mountbatten tried his best to get Jinnah to agree to an
alternative solution which would keep the subcontinent undivided. But
Jinnah kept saying ‘no’. "He was quite impervious to... any
logical argument," Mountbatten told an interviewer.

Finally ‘no’ won;
it was Mountbatten who caved in. On June 3, 1947, one of the hottest
days of an unbearable summer, Mountbatten told Jinnah that he could
have his Pakistan. So accustomed was Jinnah to saying ‘no’ that
his first impulsive response was ‘no’.

To bring himself to
say ‘yes’ just did not come easy to him. Almost as a way out of an
impasse, Mountbatten suggested to Jinnah: "All right, I will pose
the question to you; you only shake your head if you really mean ‘no’
but give a nod if you mean ‘yes’. To think that I had to say yes
or no for that clot to get his own plan through," Mountbatten had
mused. Anyhow, Jinnah gave ‘a barely perceptible nod’. Let there
be a Pakistan!

Even after that reluctant nod from
Jinnah, ‘The Mountbatten Plan’’ stood in danger of coming
unstuck if all of India’s major ruling princes could not be made to
merge into either India or Pakistan. After all, as much as 40 per cent
of India was ruled by princes. The treaties between those states and
Britain would stand annulled the day the empire ceased to exist. After
that each of those 600 odd states was, in theory, both sovereign and
independent, and it was entirely up to the rulers of those states
whether to merge with India or Pakistan or to remain independent.

Such, at any rate,
was the ‘legal’’ position — a bizarre anomaly; for neither
India nor Pakistan was going to permit a state falling within its
territory to remain independent. They would just have to merge into
either India or Pakistan, depending upon their locations. And to
facilitate the process of their merging into either India or Pakistan,
Mountbatten had devised what he called The Instrument of Accession.

Most of the Princes
readily signed the ‘instrument’. But Kashmir dithered. For a time,
Maharaja Hari Singh toyed with the idea of declaring Kashmir an
independent country — a sort of Asian Switzerland. But he was
sternly warned by India that independence was no option. He would just
have to merge, either with India or with Pakistan.

Meanwhile, Jinnah and
his strategy caucus were busy making their own plans for Kashmir. As
soon as the partition plan was announced, the more far-seeing and
ambitious career officers in the Raj’s civil and military services
had begun to ingratiate themselves with the emerging political leaders
of both countries — India as well as Pakistan. One of them, Akbar
Khan, who had just been promoted to the rank of a colonel in the army,
had been singled out by Jinnah as his advisor on military strategy.
Within days of the announcement of the Mountbatten Plan, Akbar Khan
who was in the right position to do so, managed to acquire from the
army’s store of maps, several sets of large scale maps of the state
of Jammu and Kashmir.

Jammu and Kashmir had
become a priority concern for Jinnah even before Pakistan came into
existence. It was India’s largest princely state, with an area of
84,000 square miles spread over mostly uninhabitable and indeed
inaccessible reaches of the Himalayan range. As a princely domain, it
constituted a single political unit, but its geography
compartmentalised it into three separate regions. Ladakh in the
north-east was an icy, wind-swept wasteland. Jammu in the south was
only an extension of the Punjab plains, and the Srinagar valley, the
heartland of Kashmir — the Kashmir of legend and romance, the
playground of Mughal emperors and the Raj’s Sahibs. While
Ladakh was wholly Buddhist, Jammu was roughly half-Hindu, half-Muslim
and the valley, predominantly Muslim.

The Srinagar valley
is virtually cut off from three sides, north, east and south, by high
mountain ranges, but open only towards the west, or Pakistani Punjab.
There were only two roads leading to the Srinagar valley and both were
in Pakistani territory. This meant that just by blocking off the two
roads, Pakistan could stop all essential supplies such as foodgrains
and stocks of petrol from reaching the valley.

And this Pakistan
proceeded to do within days of its creation. Hari Singh’s
increasingly more urgent appeal even for a few lorryloads of petrol
remained unanswered. "You announce your accession to Pakistan
first," he was told. "We will look after you well". In
fact Jinnah is said to have given Hari Singh a ‘Blank cheque’, as
the price of accession. Apparently Hari Singh did not trust the
promise. He had good reason for his scepticism.

Hari Singh, since he
was feudal to the bone, had no wish to surrender his inherited domain
to either India or Pakistan. Now he just had to make up his mind. The
walls all around were collapsing. On October 24, Srinagar’s
electricity supply had been cut off. Raiding troops had seized the
power station.

Akbar Khan, now a
Major-General, had been busy with his plan for conquering Kashmir.
Officers and men from Pakistan’s army had been sent on ‘leave’
so that they could recruit 5,000 tribal pathans from the
Frontier Province. They had been cantoned in convenient bases where
they were equipped with rifles and machine guns, and put under the
command of Pakistani officers dressed up as tribesmen. On October 22,
they were ferried to Kashmir’s border in 300 commandeered trucks.
Here they were debussed, on the main road to Srinagar which was
virtually undefended. Operation Gulmarg began to roll.

True, as with most
Indian states, Kashmir, too, had its army; maybe ragged and armed with
antiquated weapons, but still, adequate for guarding the mountain
frontiers against a raiding force. But almost as though acting in
concert, all the Muslim personnel in this force had deserted en
masse and taken away their weapons. Now they, too, became a part
of the invading force.

What this force did
to the people of the wayside villages and towns was a foretaste of
what lay in store for the people of the Kashmir valley. It was kill,
burn, loot, rape, all the way, and it was these excesses that delayed
‘Operation Gulmarg’, which was planned for Jinnah’s triumphal
entry into Srinagar on October 26, which was Id day. A day earlier,
Jinnah’s secretary, Khurshed Ahmad, had been sent to Srinagar, and
Jinnah himself had arrived in Lahore from Karachi to be on hand.

One wonders why, this
subterfuge? Why call in tribals to do a job which Pakistan’s own
army could have accomplished with ease? The obvious reason is that, at
this time, both the Indian and Pakistani armies had British officers
as their chiefs, and both were subordinate to an overall commander,
Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck. They would not have condoned a
clandestine operation.

In the event, on
October 26, the tribals were still on the rampage in Baramula,
killing, burning, looting. Of Baramula’s 14000 inhabitants, only
3,000 were alive the next day. That was also the day when Hari Singh
decided to merge Kashmir with India and two days later Sikh troops
were already in action on the Baramula road. The process of hurling
back the invaders had begun.

The rest is history, but a footnote
seems appropriate. It is that in 1949, Akbar Khan, now made the Chief
of the General Staff of Pakistan’s army, attempted to do what first
Ayub Khan, and then Zia ul-Haque, and then Pervez Musharraf, were
later to pull off, a military coup. Akbar’s bid failed. He was
arrested, dismissed, and sent to jail.